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 Editorials | June 2005 
The Disappeared
 Leslie Berestein - Union-Tribune
| | María López walked by the empty fields of Villa Morelos in Mexico's Michoacán state. "You see this? Before, people grew corn here. Now, nobody wants to work these fields. They would all rather leave." But her son never knocks. (Photo: Nancee E. Lewis / Union-Tribune) |
Villa Morelos, Mexico – The soft crunch of tires on dirt often rouses María López from her sleep. Her body tenses with nervous anticipation as she props herself up in the dark, listening for a familiar footstep, a familiar voice.
Sometimes she hears people talking in the distance, or a dog barking. Then the tires continue rolling down the road, toward the center of this small country town, and there is silence. She lies in a room her son built, unable to sleep.
"I keep hoping there is going to be a knock on the door, and that it's going to be him," says María, a diminutive widow who habitually wipes away tears with the edge of her dark shawl. "That it's my son, and he's come home."
Amparo Calvillo López was last seen lying in the southern Arizona desert in September 2003, unable to wake up after having fallen ill the day before. The chunky, 30-year-old father of three was trying to get back to Orlando, Fla., where he worked at an ice cream factory. He had taken three weeks off to attend his father's funeral.
Mexican authorities, who coordinated a search for him in the United States after his mother and wife reported him missing, presume that he is dead.
But there is no proof, no body to bury, at least no body that anyone has identified. So his case remains open. And against her better judgment, María waits.
In Mexico and other parts of Latin America, people such as Amparo are referred to as migrantes desaparecidos, migrants who have disappeared. Amid the raging debate over illegal immigration, they are but a little-known, tragic footnote.
No one knows exactly how many people have vanished while crossing the deserts and mountains along the Southwestern border, or along Mexican train tracks en route from Central America, or aboard leaky rafts and boats attempting to cross the Straits of Florida.
At least 1,000 desaparecidos are buried in the United States. They lie in unmarked graves in cemeteries scattered along the border from California to Texas. More than 350 are buried at the dusty rear of the Holtville cemetery near El Centro.
They constitute a third of the roughly 3,200 people who have died trying to cross the border illegally in the past decade after tighter enforcement in the San Diego area pushed migrant traffic east into deadly terrain. Eighty percent to 90 percent are believed to be Mexican.
They carried no identification, or if they did, it was lost or taken from them. Immigrant smugglers routinely discourage their clients from carrying an ID in order to shield themselves from blame if a migrant dies.
A forthcoming Mexican government database created by a San Diego company, which will be linked to a DNA bank, is expected to help identify many of the dead, especially the most recent casualties. But there are no plans to exhume those already buried, meaning that hundreds may never be identified.
Spouses waver between despair and anger, never sure if they have been widowed or abandoned. Aging parents make themselves sick with worry. Children ask when papi or mami is coming home and get confused answers from adults choking back tears.
Some families who have the means spend months combing the Mexican border region, posting fliers in migrant shelters, visiting hospitals and morgues. They chase leads of sightings, coming away crushed when they find the wrong person. Usually, they go home without answers.
"They want to believe they are alive, and there is nothing that indicates they are dead," says Carlos García, legal director of the Coordinación General para la Atención al Migrante Michoacano, one of many state agencies in Mexico that handle missing-migrant cases and other human rights issues. "Time passes and they realize this is not the case, but they are never certain."
Most of the young men in Villa Morelos are gone.
As she walked down a narrow dirt path on her way into town, María, 67, cocked her head in the direction of a weed-strewn field, one of many she has already passed.
"You see this?" she said bitterly. "Before, people grew corn here. Now, nobody wants to work these fields. They would all rather leave."
In the town's central plaza, a few old men doze on lacy iron benches beneath the trees while teenage boys sell snacks and produce in the surrounding colonial arcade. Most of the people walking around the center of town are women, some cloaked in shawls to ward off the bright Michoacán sun.
María's seven sons left one by one from the family's small brick house by a lake, where their father made brooms for a living. The family once had farmland but lost it in an inheritance squabble. There was little for the boys to do but leave.
Some went to Orlando, others to Los Angeles. During long visits home they wooed and married local girls, then left again to provide for them.
One is Amparo's wife, Alejandra Gonzáles, a tall, black-haired woman with dark eyes and a forlorn smile. His term of endearment for her was prieta, or dark one.
The last time was the most difficult. Amparo's father died in early August 2003, prompting him and most of his brothers to rush home. After the funeral, their mother was disconsolate. He didn't want to leave so soon.
"He kept saying, 'If I only had one more day, one more day,' " his wife said. "But he had his job waiting for him."
Amparo left Sept. 1, accompanied by a nephew in his late teens named Miguel. Too upset to see them off, Maria waited at a friend's house until they had gone.
They called to say their bus had made it to the Arizona border. Amparo promised to call from Los Angeles, where he planned to get a flight to Orlando.
A few mornings later, the phone rang. It was Miguel.
As he told it, he and Amparo had been walking all day in the desert with a group, following a guide. Amparo's pace was sluggish, so the guide gave him amphetamines to make him walk faster. The pills made him sick. By nightfall, he was staggering, leaning on his nephew's shoulder.
They spent the night alone, abandoned by the group. At dawn, unable to wake up Amparo, Miguel went for help. He found a road and flagged down a car, whose occupants gave him food and water and then called the Border Patrol. He was returned to Mexico, and never made it back to his uncle.
The men in the family rode the bus a day and a half from Villa Morelos to the border. They sought help from Mexican immigration officials in Sásabe, where Amparo had left from. But there was no sign of him having been rescued and repatriated. Within a week they ran out of money and came home. Not knowing what else to do, they eventually returned to their jobs in the United States.
Alone in Villa Morelos, the women are left to live with the ghost of their desaparecido.
As happens frequently with families of missing migrants, their emotions are pulled in different directions by a steady rumor mill, fueled by friends who offer sightings as encouragement. A friend of Maria's hears a local man is being held in a Tijuana prison. Could it be Amparo? Another says a man who looks like him was seen in Texas.
"What the truth is, I don't know," Maria said, wringing her weathered hands. "I think and I think. Sometimes I go days without eating, just thinking about my son."
She filed a missing-persons report with the Michoacán state migrant relations agency, providing photos, documents, even details about Amparo's teeth.
These reports are filed by many families of desaparecidos, though not all. They typically wind up in the consulates, where officials check with U.S. immigration authorities, prisons and coroners. Many people are found this way, often alive. But the search for Amparo has turned up nothing. He last appears in Border Patrol records in 2002, when he was caught during a previous trip.
García, the Michoacán state official handling the case, doubts Amparo is alive. But in all of these cases, he said, some holes can't be plugged. Migrants sometimes give U.S. authorities false names when caught at the border, making it difficult to track their entries and exits. And there are always people who disappear on purpose to start new lives.
Alejandra could no longer take living in the concrete duplex Amparo built for her behind his mother's house, where memories of him lurked in every crevice like spiders. She and the three children recently moved in with her parents, who live down the road. María sleeps in the couple's old bedroom now.
At night when the children are in bed, Alejandra stares at the ceiling and concocts different scenarios, all ugly. Is Amparo dead? Is he hiding out with a new lover? Which is worse?
"I tell her Alejandra, please, sleep," her mother lamented. "She tells me she can't."
The two youngest children still think their father will come back, bringing toys for them. But 7-year-old Vicente, the oldest, has heard the adults talking. When Alejandra tries to sugarcoat the facts, he snaps, "Don't tell me lies, mami."
Alejandra longs to escape the purgatory that Villa Morelos has become. Two sisters in Oregon have offered to send for her and the children and find her a job. María pleads that she stay, lest Amparo return and find her gone.
"I've been waiting," Alejandra said. "Time goes by, and nothing."
The wait is different for families who can afford to search for their desaparecidos themselves. They feel useful, if for a while. But being able to chase down leads can prove even more maddening than the frustration of being able to do nothing.
More than 120 miles from Villa Morelos, in the small mountain city of Zitácuaro, the bedroom that Leopoldo Sánchez Martínez slept in for most of his life is kept just as the 63-year-old widower left it the morning he departed for Mexicali.
His cologne and deodorant sit unmoved on the chipped dresser. A favorite soccer jersey hangs from a peg above his bed. The wall calendar is turned to January 2004.
Since he disappeared late that month, his relatives have conducted a grueling search that has taken them from their home in the highlands of eastern Michoacán, best known for pine forests and monarch butterflies, to the Tijuana city morgue.
"I thought I would find my brother," said his sister Estela Sánchez, 57, who with her husband spent a month traveling by bus last year, combing the border. "Our whole family is desperate. We don't know where else to turn."
Leopoldo was a door-to-door housewares salesman whose life had changed for the worse in recent years. First he lost his wife to cancer, then his business to competition.
Lonely and hurting financially, he decided to go to Palm Desert to live and work with his younger brother, who manages a flower nursery. His brother bought him a plane ticket to Mexicali, picked him up at the airport and procured a smuggler for him there.
The smuggler instructed Leopoldo to hand his wallet to his brother. It was just for safekeeping, he told them.
The family would later learn that Leopoldo was walking with a group of migrants and a guide in a rugged mountain area, likely near Tecate, when everyone spotted a helicopter and ran, scattering in all directions. He was never seen again.
The smuggler refused to say where Leopoldo got lost.
"He only admitted that he lost my brother," said Zeferino Sánchez, 47. "Then he made himself unavailable."
Zeferino, who felt responsible, orchestrated a search from the north. A legal U.S. resident, he printed a stack of 1,000 fliers and combed the police stations, jails, hospitals, shelters and morgues of Mexicali, Tecate and Tijuana, commuting to the border after work and on weekends.
His nephew Ricardo, who lives in Guadalajara, was the only one of Leopoldo's children who could afford to leave work. With help from Zeferino, he joined his uncle and worked the south side of the California border.
Waiting for news in Zitácuaro with other family members, Estela envisioned her brother penniless and hungry in a strange border city. What if the migra had repatriated him through Texas? Some migrants caught in Arizona had been sent there the previous year, and the buzz was still fresh in Mexico.
With their savings and help from relatives, she and her husband, José, flew to Chihuahua two months after Leopoldo disappeared and began working their way toward the Texas border by bus.
They posted their own fliers in every town they stopped in, even in farm laborer camps, where they feared Leopoldo might have landed for lack of money.
They traveled north to El Paso, then west toward Tijuana, staying in cheap motels and washing their clothes in bathroom sinks.
Every now and then, someone would recognize the man on the flier.
"Each time someone told me they had seen my brother, my heart would jump," Estela said. "I would be so happy I would start to cry."
In one town, they heard that a man who looked like Leopoldo sold beer in the baseball stadium. Off they went to the ballpark, on the bus in the rain. It wasn't him.
Toward the end of the month-long trip, Estela followed her husband into a squat building in Tijuana. She noticed an odd smell.
"Where are we?" she asked.
"At the morgue," he said.
Estela broke down.
"No!" she sobbed. "My brother is not dead!"
More than a year later, Estela still believes he is alive. She has filed a missing-persons report. Every afternoon she prays at home in front of a makeshift shrine to her brother, asking God to help her find him.
Leopoldo's family struggles with not knowing what to make of his disappearance. His granddaughter Yadira, who lives downstairs from his empty room, keeps it clean and dusted as if he's due home any day. His son Raúl, who lives in the same rambling house, has begun to think he is dead.
Ricardo in Guadalajara doesn't want to visit home, afraid his father's absence will kill his hope.
Zeferino keeps his brother's duffel bag in his Palm Desert closet. Like the bedroom in Zitácuaro, Leopoldo's neatly packed jeans and polo shirts are waiting for him.
In the past year, Zeferino has traveled to the border when he can, searching as far south as the tomato fields of San Quintín,roughly 130 miles south of Ensenada. He has learned nothing but refuses to let go.
"If someone told me he was dead," Zeferino said, "I would stop looking." |
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